Synopsis
Book by Clark Martin
Extrait
One
After considering the possibilities for six days and six nights, it seemed pointless to mention sex or weakness or the girl, so Joel King decided his final sermon would be pale and simple, no more and no less than the ordinary things he’d said to his congregation in the past. There were, of course, several last-stand temptations he’d contemplated while staring at his laptop, and two he’d quixotically pecked to life even though he knew all along they’d never depart his study. The first composition was a blaze of fury, defiance and “how-dare-you” indignation. Jacked on coffee and Jonathan Edwards, he wasted an afternoon creating a fiery screed that would have him going out unbowed and bare-knuckled, every syllable a conflagration, every breath a test of will, the pulpit seething with brimstone and bit- ter jabs into the air. Then, on Friday morning, his wife called him a “pissant,” and by that evening, during a long, drab rain, a flamboyant collapse seemed—for an hour or so at least—like a good choice. Midway through this one, he started to use a Pentecostal tongue, typed the word “Gawd” a lot and didn’t worry about periods, just strung together sentences he could preach big-time, throwing back his head and squeezing his eyes shut, the snot and tears running on his cheeks as he finished his career with a sopping, over-the-top, tent-revival mea culpa full of biblical caterwauling and pitifully rococo pleas to the forgiving heavenly Father.
It was all foolishness, though, silly and self-pitying, because his temperament was neither angry nor dramatic, and in the end he wasn’t going to turn nasty or cry like the caramelized hucksters on the round-the-clock religion channels. Despite his musings and indulgences, there was little doubt he’d settle on fifteen minutes of typical Baptist formula—a New Testament passage, a homily anchored in humanity and levity, and a message whose three small themes combined to reveal a bigger picture.
Standing beside his high-back chair in front of fifty-eight crowded pews, Joel could hear the choir crank up behind him, close to sixty pious folks cloaked by awkward robes with zippered fronts. There were a couple of strong baritones in the mix and a single passable alto, the rest an earnest muddle, a high, flat trilling that sounded vaguely strained and far too formal. Out in his church, he saw men and women standing shoulder to shoulder and sharing hymnals, the women giving every note its due, most of the men mute or barely mumbling the song’s refrain. He was searching for something to keep, something vivid and clear he could walk off with: a shaft of blue-tinted light from the stained glass, a boy’s loopy grin above a shirt collar several sizes too big, the furrows of wisdom and contentment that marked a sage face. He looked for the Lord’s kind alms, took in everything before him with the hope of seeing more than was there.
All he got at first was a thought, an odd realization that skittered across his mind. It occurred to him that almost every house of worship he’d laid eyes on—this one included—was carpeted in red. He actually opened his mouth and whispered the word into the music: “Red.” The color of so many things touched by his trade. Obviously he discerned the Savior’s shed blood in the crimson floor, the gift of death and resurrection stretching from entrance to altar in commercial-grade glory that didn’t show wear and was hard to soil. The color of passion was there, too, passion in so many of its ways and varieties, from generous to brutal. The hue of fire, the devil’s shade, the heart’s stain—just about everything under the sun was covered in the red aisles of the Roanoke First Baptist Church. And perhaps that is what I will take away from this day, Joel concluded as he shut his hymnal. That, and nothing else.
He opened his sermon with scripture from the Book of Matthew as his flock sat expectantly, waiting for a hint, an explanation, an apology, a denial. When he hesitated at five minutes before noon to sip from a water glass resting on the edge of the pulpit, backs turned rigid, ears cocked and the church’s weight rustled and creaked forward. Walter Butler began rolling the dial on his hearing aid. Peggy and Larry Rice—newlyweds Joel had baptized after Larry’s drug rehab—mouthed “Please, Jesus,” and held hands. Joel cleared his throat and finished his last point, said nothing they wanted to hear, and as he called for the closing prayer, very few heads were bowed or humble. He peered out at the bewilderment and mild anger of people who felt they were owed and not paid. The single satisfied expression belonged to Edmund Brooks, who was staring at him from the far end of the front row, nodding slightly in the way people did when they agreed with their preacher, when the message had found truth or mentioned something everyone thought needed to be said.
Joel looked away from Edmund, letting his eyes wander through his congregation until a bit of magic stirred up in the corner of his sight, a striking impossibility that spun his head and returned him to Edmund’s pew seat. Joel saw a red blur he’d overlooked, a silky scarlet rope suddenly growing out of the rug, as if the red on the floor were pouring into Edmund, rising from the ground. What in the Lord’s name? What the . . . Queer as it seemed, it was like the crazy world was finally coming apart, trying to wrap itself around Edmund’s windpipe.
Joel had to blink and scrub his eyes before he realized what was happening. There was nothing aberrant or miraculous in his vision, no Revelation’s horse or water turning into wine—Edmund was simply wearing a necktie the exact color of the carpet. He was hunched forward, his elbows were propped on his thighs, and his posture caused the tie to fall in an unbroken crimson path that began at his collar and widened into more of the same at his feet. Like he was bleeding rug from his throat, Joel thought, or the ground had latched on to his neck with a red tether and was pulling him down. Even though Joel was able to solve the illusion, he still kept watch on Edmund during the prayer, cheating through slits that appeared completely closed.
Edmund was a newcomer to Roanoke First Baptist, a businessman from Las Vegas who’d been in town for a year or so. Sitting in church, he was simultaneously still and kinetic, jittery and static in the same outline, like a kid’s whirligig with a spinning center inside a stationary metal frame, the whole contraption set off by yanking a string. Every Sunday he dropped a hundred-dollar bill into the collection plate—yes, the preacher was aware of who generously tithed—and he engulfed Joel’s hand with two palms and ten fingers the first time the men met each other after the service, Joel dressed in his preacher’s robe, Edmund in a black dandy suit. Edmund was dark-haired, tall and handsome, with powerful shoulders and features that fit together well, but Joel noticed early on that his left hand was somewhat peculiar. Edmund’s ring finger was much smaller than the rest, not ugly or deformed, but just grown in miniature, a tiny fourth digit with a nail the size of a match head. Perhaps to compensate, he wore a diamond band on his middle finger and fancy cuff links that complemented the ring.
At the conclusion of the prayer, Joel stood beneath the pulpit while the choir ploughed through “Nearer My God to Thee.” This was when people would walk up the aisle to join the church or ask for baptism; they would lean close to embrace Joel, and he would speak to them in a low voice—not a whisper, just his normal tone dropped two clicks softer—as the choir repeated the first and second verses of whatever hymn was being sung. He began to fade out of “Nearer My God” for an instant, things went quiet in his head, and the red floor, colored windows and fine clothes gradually receded, ebbed away from him. He swallowed hard and tried to wet his mouth, felt dread, sorrow and shame cutting through his stomach. No one came to the front asking to be saved, so he made his way to the end of the aisle, a crackling buzz in his ears and a tremble in his legs, adrenaline and tension seeping into his limbs as if a sickness were about to begin, a voracious, leeching fever.
At the door, people passed by in a Cubist jumble of eyes and lips and noses and teeth. He was trying to stay steady, trying to escape from the shakes and weakness, struggling to slow the gush of fractured, spotty scenes and piece them into sense. A little boy and girl were running up and down the center aisle, rambunctious twins were clamoring around under the pews, Nancy Fitzpatrick was removing flowers from the communion table, and Austin Whitehead was shutting off the sound system. On any other Sunday, Joel would have waited for everyone to leave, then humbly knelt in his empty church and said a prayer of thanksgiving.
About ten people into the line, he found a few crumbs of equilibrium and began to get a better take on the smears and fragments streaming by him. He was aware of several more hugs than he was used to, and tears. Folks recalled old times, their greetings were more heartfelt and somber than normal, and a man who wouldn’t quit probing his face offered him a small wooden cross, carved by hand, he insisted, not store-bought. It was a compassionate crowd; the doubters and finger-waggers and letter-writers who wanted him gone had either stayed away or were skulking out the side exit, packs of men and women wound up in muttered, grumbling conversations. Horace Ayers waited until he was far removed from the sanctuary and almost to his car before he told his wife of twenty-six years Joel King was a liar and a damn disgrace. Of all the mob with torches and rope, only Foster Pullins—the deacon who’d pushed the hardest for Joel’s dismissal—met him at the door and wished him well, claiming he’d remember Joel in his prayers.
Edmund Brooks smiled and shook hands, his same ritual repeated without any change, as if he’d understood the meaning of what Joel had done and wanted to abide by his minister’s last wishes. “Good message, Preacher. A good sermon.” Edmund always said this.
“Thank you,” Joel answered.
“See you soon. You take care, okay?” This instead of “See you next week,” his usual remark.
“I will. Thanks for everything.” Joel gave Edmund a limp embrace before he turned to leave, then said goodbye to the Clements, a sweet, elderly couple who smelled of mothballs and liniment and took a long time to shuffle past. He glanced outside, where he noticed Edmund chatting with Regina Patterson. Edmund touched her arm—right above her elbow—and when he started to walk off, both his eyes were still on her, lagging behind, pure white at one corner of the sockets, his dark pupils jammed as far left as they could go at the other corner. Regina gazed at him, and a tiny separation appeared between her lips, a little gap she didn’t do away with until Edmund had corrected his eyes and moved on. A few moments later, Edmund greeted her husband with the same pleasant vigor he brought to every exchange, said something cordial and looked over his shoulder at the church’s doorway. Joel saw the whole affair for what it was, and was relieved he would not be charged with sorting through the alpha and omega of three people’s sinful distress.
About half the crowd had filed by when Julie Richardson arrived in front of him. Julie was married to an orthopedic surgeon who was as diffident as she was brash. She was a gradation above the high end of acceptable, five tennis bracelets too many on one wrist and a face job at age forty-six that pulled her skin so taut her cheeks and forehead appeared to be grocery meat tightly bound in shrink-wrap. Today, her smooth, stretched countenance was conspicuously set on grim, and her whole person—jewels, perfume, snug skirt, tanning-bed-brown arms—was stacked onto four-hundred-dollar high heels, waiting to crash against Joel like a country-club tsunami. Here it comes, he thought. Here it comes.
Julie grabbed both his hands and then stood there theatrically mute for the longest time. She and Joel looked as if they were frozen in the middle of some zoot-suit swing step or at the very beginning of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” A playful child’s foot clipped a pew near the front of the church, made a deep, bass sound that bounced all over the sanctuary.
“Joel, I’m so, so sorry about this,” Julie announced, still at arm’s length.
“Thanks. I appreciate your saying that.”
“So very sorry,” she repeated.
“Most things happen for a reason. You and Howard have been fine friends.” He felt Julie tighten her grip. “I’m disappointed to be going. I’ll miss everyone.”
“And I don’t care who hears it, I’ll say it right here in front of the Lord and everyone else, but I know you didn’t lay a hand on that girl. You did not touch her, and I’ll say to anyone and everyone that she’s a damn tramp and her father’s a rich fool and you’re being railroaded. So there.” She twisted around to face the people standing behind her. “Railroaded,” she said loudly.
“Julie, listen, I appreciate the support, but this is not the place or—”
She lunged forward and seized him, circled her bony arms around his ribs and patted his back. “You keep your chin up, Joel King. You’re always welcome in our house.” She pulled away, transferred a kiss from her fingertips to Joel’s cheek, then jingled and sparkled down the front stairs, headed to a fine car and three or four afternoon white wines.
Beyond the rest of the people waiting, anxious to say goodbye or thank him for a generous visit to a sickbed, he caught sight of Martha, his wife, leaning against the end of a pew. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t give an inch, kept a lifeless, tight smile cut into her face and avoided as many people as she could. She wasn’t going to run out or leave early or be brought low in her own sanctuary, but she darn sure wasn’t about to stand at Joel’s elbow or hold his hand when they left and walked to the van to drive away. She was as enigmatic as he about what had happened, albeit with a lit- tle more cool edge in the way she said her few farewells and accepted a needlepoint verse from her ladies’ Bible study group. Joel watched her suffer in her inexpensive minister’s wife’s dress, saw her tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear.
Cathy Reynolds was a dependable, practical woman, a schoolteacher with two mannerly children, and she was next in line, behind Julie. She stood erect and wiped her eyes with a balled-up tissue. “Good luck, Joel.”
“Thank you. Thanks.”
“I can be at the trial if you like. To speak for you.”
He half-smiled. “There’s no need. And it wouldn’t be right to drag this church into court.”
Cathy opened her purse and stuffed the damp knot of tissue inside. “We believe in you, Joel. We really do. And no matter what happened, that doesn’t change the good and decent man you are. All the fine things you’ve done, the time you’ve given, the families you’ve helped—we won’t forget.”
Joel hung his head, blocked almost the entire church from his view. He saw his wingtip shoes on the carpet, his own legs, Cathy Reynolds’s ankles and shins, and a stray bulletin someone had dropped near the door. He surrendered, finally starting to cry, kept his face angled down and his body upright so the first tears never touched skin but just fell straight onto the rug, three or four sprinkles that turned the red a fuller, darker hue. Joel stayed bent and thanked Cathy a second time in a voice sad and dismal. He was moved because he understood her affirmation, her pledge to him, was really much more than that. If he was a fraud and a cad, then this was about her and her worship and where she prayed and the fundamental things holding her faith to...
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